Al Martinez: Find Bigfoot? Been there, done that

The large, hairy biped called Bigfoot has just taken another quantum leap into our lives. No, he wasn't spotted sipping a double latte at Starbucks, but he is being seen on television. As Desi Arnaz used to say, let me 'splain.

The beast that has haunted our imagination since 1840 is being featured in a new series on Animal Planet called "Finding Bigfoot" which is purported to prove that the creature - also known as Sasquatch, Yeti, Yowee, Ogopogo, Orang-pendek and Little Bruno - is real.

A team of three "investigators" that includes a onetime paparazzi wannabe named Matt Moneymaker will be traveling about exploring the phenomenon by talking to people who have seen, heard or smelled the elusive beast hunched by a mountain campfire dining on raccoon stew.

The team might also eventually include a man named Erik Beckjord who once owned a Bigfoot museum in the back room of a Malibu bar and who claimed to have had psychic contact with the creature. Oh, yes, and then there's Danny Perez, founder and sole member of the Norwalk Center for Bigfoot Studies and publisher of the Bigfoot Times.

I know a little about the mythological half-man, half-gorilla because I have personally searched for him twice, once in 1963 around a ski resort in the Sierra Nevadas called Strawberry and again in 1990 in the San Gabriel Mountains.

We had a room overlooking the city dump in Strawberry which was perfect because that's where Bigfoot was seen rummaging through the garbage, although Cinelli, who was with me, did not feel that a room overlooking a dump was all that perfect. Bigfoot never appeared and I pulled a shoulder muscle sledding down a snowy slope, so the Strawberry Expedition wasn't my finest hour.

The search in the San Gabriel Mountains occurred when a Yowee was spotted crashing through the chaparral about 150 yards off Big Tujunga Road. Moneymaker and Perez heard about it and invited me to accompany them in their search for the primate. Cinelli came along for the laughs.

We spent a really boring Sunday afternoon looking for signs of a beast I didn't even believe in, keeping contact with each other with walkie-talkies. My code name was Bigfoot Two, which Cinelli thought was pretty funny and calls me Bigfoot Two to this very day. "Time to take out the garbage, Bigfoot Two," she says. "You can rummage through it if you'd like."

We didn't find Bigfoot there either and I have gotten too damned old to tramp through the mountains anymore, despite the resurgence of interest due to the Animal Planet series and to a recent finding by an alleged genetic researcher who claims that DNA tests prove that Ogopogo is real.

Whatever the TV researcher finds will go into my cryptoscience file next to the drawer that collects the testimony of past life regressionists and those abducted by space aliens. They're part of the Bigfoot Two Investigative Volumes.

Al Martinez writes a column on Mondays. He can be reached at almtz13@aol.com